For Obama, it's no more Mr. Nice Media

By Howard Kurtz, CNN

Updated 1809 GMT (0109 HKT) May 17, 2013

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IRS targeting | 2013 – Officials in the Obama administration's Internal Revenue Service came under fire after revelations that workers in its Cincinnati office targeted for extra scrutiny tea party and conservative groups applying for 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status.

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Benghazi | 2012 – President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came under intense scrutiny about the handling of the investigation of the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that led to the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other embassy employees.

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Iraq War | 2003 – When President George W. Bush addressed the nation aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in May of 2003, standing in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner, few expected that the U.S. involvement in the deadly Iraq War would last for another eight years.

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CIA/Plame leak | 2003 – Former CIA covert agent Valerie Plame Wilson had her identity revealed by George W. Bush's Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage after her husband wrote a scathing op-ed in The New York Times.

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Monica Lewinsky | 1998 – President Bill Clinton was ultimately impeached by Congress after he lied under oath about an affair he had with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

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Iran/Contra pardons | 1992 – President George H. W. Bush pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and five other officials who served under Ronald Reagan for their involvement in trading arms for hostages in Iran.

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Iran-Contra | 1986 – Senior officials working for President Ronald Reagan secretly arranged for the sale of military weapons to Iran with the hope that American hostages held there would be released and the proceeds could be used to fund the Contras fighting in a rebellion in Nicaragua -- a violation of the Boland Act that expressly prohibited U.S. funding of the rebels.

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Iran hostage crisis | 1979 – For 444 days -- ending in what would be the final year of his presidency -- President Jimmy Carter sought to gain the release of 52 Americans held hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran.

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Watergate pardons | 1974 – In one of his first acts as president, Gerald Ford granted "a full, free and absolute pardon" to former President Richard Nixon for all crimes he may have committed while president, including his involvement in the Watergate scandal.

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Watergate | 1974 – President Richard Nixon resigned his office after being implicated in a cover-up following a burglary at political offices in the Watergate building.

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Agnew resigns | 1973 – Spiro T. Agnew, who served as vice president under President Richard Nixon, resigned his position after being indicted for bribery charges, becoming the first U.S. vice president in history to resign under criminal charges.

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Pentagon Papers | 1971 – The Pentagon Papers, a top-secret document that detailed U.S. decisions leading up to the Vietnam War, were leaked to The New York Times by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. The Nixon administration obtained an injunction to stop their publication.

Story highlights

He says attention isn't just out of press self-interest; Obama's stuck in number of scandals

He says that for the first time, press started to think Obama misled them

Kurtz: GOP may overreach to damage Obama; still, scandal could drown out governing

The press has turned on President Obama with a vengeance.

Suddenly, the White House briefing room is filled with confrontational questions. Suddenly, the news pages are ablaze with scandal, and the commentators -- even some of the president's usual defenders -- are bemoaning his shortcomings. Suddenly, Obama isn't getting the benefit of the doubt.

According to Obama's longtime detractors, the denizens of the fourth estate are finally climbing out of a tank in which they have been immersed since roughly 2007. But the reality is a bit more nuanced than that.

There are a number of unsavory allegations swirling around Washington, but do not underestimate the importance of the Justice Department seizing two months of Associated Press phone records without so much as a heads-up. This not only seems like a case of prosecutorial overreach, even in a case involving national security, it strikes at the heart of what journalists do -- and has fostered feelings of betrayal. Does the administration not understand the chilling effect on reporters and their sources, they wonder, or simply not care?

Howard Kurtz

It's easy to say that news organizations recoiled from Obama only when their own special interests were threatened, and maybe there's some truth to that. But the media also have a deep, abiding love for scandal, and beyond the AP phone records story, the administration is lately providing that scandal in spades.

The battle over Benghazi has mostly divided along partisan lines, with conservatives seeing a sustained coverup and liberals perceiving a partisan attack on what was a bungled operation and confused aftermath. But the report by ABC's Jonathan Karl alleging the scrubbing of the Susan Rice talking points (following a less-noticed report by Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard) transformed the tone of the coverage in a single stroke.

The Karl report turned out to be based on an inaccurate, misleading characterization of an email, but for the first time, many journalists came to believe the administration had something to hide—and that they had been personally misled in press briefings. That is guaranteed to get the blood flowing.

The disclosure that the IRS selectively targeted conservative groups for review brought immediate condemnation from many across the media spectrum, including Carl Bernstein, who investigated the Nixonian abuses, of which this story carries an unmistakable echo. And it is the trifecta of these scandalous sagas that will dominate coverage for months as media outlets feast on the cycle of investigations, hearings, subpoenas, resignations and denials.

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Any doubt that scandal trumps ideology in the media firmament can be dispelled with a glance back at Bill Clinton's tenure, when what he called the "knee-jerk liberal press" investigated Monica Lewinsky, Whitewater and other allegations with a fervor that eventually put it on a virtual war footing against the White House.

More troubling for the current crew is that news outlets are starting to pivot to broader questions about whether Obama is competent at the business of government or a passive bystander in his own administration. That impression, if it takes hold, cannot be Etch-a-Sketched away.

To be sure, some of Obama's antagonists will overreach by framing every scandal as the next Watergate and each revelation as an impeachable offense. That may trigger a counter-reaction in which some of the president's liberal allies shift their focus from the administration's missteps to the opposition's overkill.

Some in the media rolled over for Barack Obama in the 2008 campaign, though the record was decidedly more mixed once he took office. But personal feelings toward this president who has never courted the press no longer matter; nor do personal predilections on gun control and immigration reform. The scandal machinery has kicked into high gear, and its sheer noise may drown out everything else.